by Paula Guran
“Yes, she’s very good,” Terry conceded. “Except that when she practices, she only plays the same tune over and over. It’s driving me mad.”
Philippa asked him if he could identify it. He hummed it instead, feeling a little self-conscious.
Philippa looked away. She shrugged after a few moments. “Sorry, I don’t recognize it. Listen, I’m sure whatever this is will blow over. Ava is adjusting.” She placed her hand on his arm. “She’s been through an awful lot.”
Terry leaned in closer, “That’s not all. When you’re gone I hear her talking in the piano room. Talking to . . . ”
Philippa nodded. “I don’t think you need to worry about that. She’s obviously not ready to let go of Prue just yet. At least she’s talking.”
“I suppose.” But Terry couldn’t see past how morbid it was.
“Besides, why do you think people visit gravestones?” Philippa continued. “They offload. The dead have no choice but to listen.”
When Ava went to school that day Terry went straight to the piano room. He needed to address the strange influence the urn was having on his daughter. Despite what Philippa said, there was something unnatural about the communication in the piano room.
He didn’t give much credence to the supernatural, but he knew how stubborn Prue had been in life, and if anyone would flout the laws of death it would be her. He’d thought about replacing Prue’s ashes with soil or something, wondering if getting rid of them would somehow restore normality. But it all seemed so underhand. He wanted to resolve this civilly, parent to parent. He’d practiced the words in his workroom but now, in the presence of Prue’s urn, he was at a loss. He stared at the floor.
They’d managed to avoid each other pretty well over the years. When he picked up Ava he usually stayed in the car and honked the horn. But with death, a strange desire to see his ex-wife had overwhelmed him. He wanted to see what she’d become, to look down on the woman who had caused him so much misery. He remembered the last time he’d seen her in the Chapel of Rest; standing over her, he’d felt a strange sense of victory, one which hadn’t involved the courts or social services. He’d won the right to his daughter just by waiting it out.
Prue had looked different, slightly bloated. He wasn’t sure whether she’d put weight on over the years or if it was the effect of death. He’d read somewhere that a corpse had many of its fluids removed, to stop the natural bloating that sets in with rigor mortis and the body was pumped full of embalming fluid. He knew the dead were dressed up like this for the viewing public, a strange kind of charade; an attempt to stop the clock, to avoid the inevitable putrescence. Her face had been painted an unnatural shade, her skin alive with an artificial glow. He’d wanted to touch her cheek to see if it felt the same but he knew it would be cold and he didn’t want to ruin the illusion.
He thought about how her body would have been doused in disinfectant and germicidal solutions. The body he had lain with, made love to in the back of his first car. The embalmer massaging the legs and arms the way he had once caressed them. The eyes posed shut with an eye cap. Worst of all was the mouth. The mouth he’d kissed. The mouth that whispered I love you, I’m having a baby, the mouth that had screamed at him a hundred times, or closed tightly in disappointment or anger when they’d exhausted words. All the things it had left unsaid, sown shut with ligature and a needle or stuck together with adhesive. He had known then, without any doubt, that Prue was gone. That the body before him was only an echo of her, the undertaker’s artifice. In death the real face crumbles, the mouth rolls open, gawping in a way that Prue herself would have described as uncouth, expelling the soul with its final breath.
Back in his workroom, Terry finally began to relax. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was surrounded by the tools of his trade, the reassuring ticking of the carriage clocks, or the silent narratives of the objects he’d resurrected, whatever it was, he felt consoled. He rummaged through his toolbox, forgetting what he was looking for but enjoying the sound of metal rattling. He wanted to make some noise. He felt like celebrating. He’d finally given Prue a piece of his mind after all these years.
He’d felt ridiculous at first, of course, speaking to the urn, saying the words aloud in the quiet room. It was absurd. But it was better than staying silent on the subject. It became easier when he imagined Prue in the Chapel of Rest. Then the words had poured out of him. They gushed uncensored from his lips, thirteen years’ worth of latent discontent suddenly given voice. He’d shouted and sworn, threatened to scatter her ashes to the corners of the earth unless she left their daughter alone. The dead have no choice but to listen and he left the room feeling as if he’d finally vanquished his demons. That by speaking his mind he’d performed some kind of exorcism, that the house would finally be free of its strange deathly silence. The sudden blare of music startled him.
Terry put his hands to his ears, shocked at how loud it was. It thundered down from the attic, louder than anything he had heard before. It made his heart race, filling him with an urgency to make it stop.
He raced up the stairs, towards its source. It was too loud for any melody, for words. It was an alarm, a war cry, an enormous echoing din.
Bursting into Ava’s room Terry made straight for the stereo and turned it off. He sat panting on her bed, listening to his relaxing heartbeat, savoring the new silence.
When he finally looked up, he received his second shock of the morning: Ava’s bedroom was completely transformed. Her clothes were neatly folded, the debris that had previously crowded the carpet put away. Her desk was clear of makeup and CDs, and in their stead were a pile of schoolbooks and a neatly arranged pad of A4 paper. Terry stood and turned. The room was immaculate, spotless. Apart from the work on her desk, there was nothing else in the room. Even her picture frames had been removed, the walls bare.
For a moment Terry wondered what Ava’s room had been like when she lived with Prue. He’d never asked her. He imagined that Prue would’ve run a pretty tight ship. He doubted she’d be allowed posters on the walls, to leave clothes on the floor. Maybe these months living with him had been a rebellion against her mother. And if so, why had she reverted back?
Terry shook his head, bemused. He should’ve been glad that the images of bronzed hunks had been removed from his daughter’s room, but it was all so sudden. And where had all of it gone?
Terry crouched, pulling aside the duvet to peer under Ava’s bed, wondering if Prue had also snooped through their daughter’s things. The space under the bed was pretty much empty as well, containing only the discarded rolled up posters and the music box.
Terry retrieved it and brushed it down, the black lacquer gleaming underneath the dust. He thought for a moment that maybe he shouldn’t open it, that maybe it would contain something private, a diary or a keepsake. Maybe something that would explain her strange behavior, he thought, justifying his desire to unclasp it.
Empty.
He waited for the mechanical notes to begin playing. He wound the spring and opened the box again, expecting the action to spur the steel mechanism inside. But no sound came. Terry opened and closed it a few more times, each time anticipating the tinny mechanical melody. But it was silent. He’d take it to his workshop and see if he could fix it, wondering all while why Ava hadn’t told him it was broken.
Terry ordered pizza that night on purpose, hoping that it would incite Ava to criticize him about his cholesterol again. But she ate her slice in silence, cutting it into small neat pieces instead of picking it up with her hands like she used to. He wasn’t sure whether to come clean about going into her room—she’d always been pretty protective about her private space—but she’d soon discover her music box gone and besides, any reaction was better than none. “I went into your room today,” Terry said, breaking the silence. “You left your music on.”
Ava continued eating.
“Your room looks pretty tidy. I’m glad you took my advice.” But he wasn’t glad at all. He preferr
ed it when it was a tip, when she played her music really loud and ate her food with noisy mouthfuls.
Ava glared at him but still she didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, I’ve taken the music box.” Terry knew she’d know now that he’d been snooping under her bed, but he didn’t care. “You should have told me it was broken. I’ll try and get it fixed, if that’s what you want?”
Ava put her cutlery down and looked at him again. Her eyes were softer this time, almost imploring. It frustrated him more than her anger.
“Ava, for goodness’ sake, what’s wrong?” he said. He heard his words reverberating in his head. He waited a few moments for her to reply and when she didn’t, he stood. “Talk to me!” he yelled, knocking his plate off the table in his rage. It fell to the floor, shattering into pieces.
Ava raised her hands to her ears, closing her eyes.
“Ava, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
But she was up from the table in a flash, running up the stairs to the attic.
Terry watched her go, then he stooped to pick up the shards of crockery. He wondered at Ava’s reaction to the noise. For though his rage had been voluble, and he watched the plate shatter, he couldn’t remember it making a sound.
Terry gradually became accustomed to the silence. He went about his day as if his world had been muted. As if a strange cloud had descended over them, cushioning the usual sounds a household made. Ava withdrew into the silence, into the attic, only appearing for her piano lesson or for meals. He spent so little time with his daughter it was almost as if Prue had never died.
Terry sat in his workroom, listening, waiting for Ava’s piano lesson to begin. Nothing happened for a while and then he heard Philippa’s raised voice and footsteps on the stairs, heading to the attic. He headed to the music room, finding Philippa sat alone on the piano stool.
“What happened?”
“It’s broken, I don’t know how.” She lifted the lid and pressed a key to demonstrate. “It’s impossible, unless someone came in here and silenced it.”
Terry sat down beside her, thinking about how his attempts to fix the music box had also failed.
“So Ava’s still not talking,” Philippa observed, “what’s her problem anyway?”
Terry shrugged. He spread his fingers over the keys, pretending to be able to play. Without any sound it was easier to imagine the melody in his head, the melody Ava usually practiced. The imagined music distracted him from the alarm that was building up inside. Where was the sound going? Why did the house seem to prefer the quiet?
Philippa placed her hand on Terry’s. He stopped moving his fingers in imaginary playing. He let it rest there under hers.
“You know,” Philippa whispered, “before she took a vow of silence, Ava told me about why she wanted the attic room. She said that you hear things better at the top, that the acoustics are better the higher you are.” She spoke the next words slowly. “The best seats in the house are in the gods.” Terry winced. They were Prue’s words. Repeated often in mock enthusiasm when they couldn’t afford the better seats, lower down. She believed them in the end, doggedly buying the seats the farthest from the stage.
“I lied the other day,” Philippa said withdrawing her hand, “about the piece Ava plays all the time. I do recognize it. You do too. How could you have forgotten?”
Terry stared at the piano keys, hearing only silence. And then he was sitting in the theatre, one sister on either side. He watched the orchestra pile in to murmurs from the auditorium. They were dressed in black formal wear, placing their instruments at their feet, or holding them in their laps. The conductor arrived and it became suddenly silent, the musicians and audience hushed. And then the tapping as the conductor counted them in.
They were in the gods of course. It had taken Prue ages to waddle up the stairs. But she couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. Besides, they had no money then. She’d placed his hand against her stomach and he felt the baby inside swimming around to the music. At the interval, Philippa volunteered to help him get the ice cream. Prue was relieved to stay where she was.
They’d gone down together.
The theatre had a concave of private boxes. Relics from a time before, closed now for renovation. He was helping to restore them; it was how they’d known about the production in the first place. He was proud of his work. Prue never seemed to want to listen but Philippa was so engrossed holding the pile of ice cream tubs. It would only take him a moment to show her the balustraded parapet, the gilded plasterwork.
He closed the door. The wallpaper was decorated with nightingales.
They just made it back in time for the second half. The ice cream was soft. Prue never said a word.
That night Terry dreamt of the quiet room. He was expecting it, almost hoping for it. He felt as if he were on the wave of Ava’s melody, rising and falling, building up to a final, inevitable climax. He didn’t want to fight against it any longer. He felt himself carried along by it, up the stairs to his daughter’s room, sweeping him across the threshold into the cold, quiet space. The posters were back on the walls. They looked even more obscene than before. He didn’t want to see their oiled male torsos, their wanton expressions leering down at his daughter. He ripped one off of the wall, standing back in surprise at what was exposed behind.
A huge gaping hole. An enormous black pit, audibly sucking the air out of the room. He pulled down another and saw a similar void. He tried to peer into the darkness but couldn’t see anything, couldn’t concentrate on anything but the noise. He removed the other posters, revealing similar vacuums, the sound deafening in the quiet room. Terry felt himself being dragged toward them, pulled toward the unknown.
Beyond the room, beyond the din, he could hear Ava’s faint playing, the familiar melody barely a whisper. He latched onto its harmony and filled his mind with it, following its thread. He grabbed hold of the bedstead, then the desk, moving slowly through the room to the hallway, finally shutting the door behind him.
Silence.
He made his way down the stairs to the music room, this time prepared for the congregation inside. They were dressed in black as before, with their heads bent low as if in mourning. Terry didn’t waste time trying to talk to them. He walked past them looking for the source of the silence. Ava was at the keyboard, her hands on the lid, her fingers dancing along the surface, playing her silent music. But this time Terry confronted what was on top. He could face Prue now that she was dead.
What he saw made him stagger. If he hadn’t been condemned to silence, he would have screamed.
Lying on top of the piano was Prue’s corpse. She looked almost as she did in the Chapel of Rest. Her eyes shut, her hands arranged demurely, but her legs wide open, revealing cheap stockings and a glimpse of her underwear. She looked like some slutty nightclub singer. Terry walked around the piano, an absurd bier, staring at the woman he had once loved.
He felt compelled to touch her cold skin, prepared to shatter the illusion. But just as he reached for her, she turned her head towards him and it wasn’t Prue’s face but Philippa’s staring back, opening her lifeless eyes. And as he recoiled from her she opened her mouth, ripping the embalmer’s stitches from her lips and letting out the ear-piercing scream he couldn’t make.
Terry woke with the scream in his mind. It was morning and glancing at his alarm clock he realized he had overslept. He wondered why Ava hadn’t woken him, remembering then that Ava hadn’t said a word to him for over a week. She had probably already left for school with nothing but the silence of the morning for company.
Terry put on his dressing gown and went up to her bedroom. He rapped a few times on the door and opened it, her absence confirming that she had already left. It was still a tidy, blank, shell, an empty cocoon that had facilitated her startling change. Terry wanted to take a sledgehammer to it, to break the unnatural silence with the sound of wood splintering, of plaster falling. He recalled shredding the posters in his dream, the delight it had give
n him ripping them from the wall, and he remembered the actual posters rolled up under Ava’s bed.
He fell to his knees, thrusting his arm into the darkness to retrieve them. He sat on Ava’s bed and unrolled the first of them, revealing the image of a bronzed torso, progressing to well-defined shoulders, then a muscular neck with a prominent Adam’s apple. He stopped at the head, realizing, as he saw the model’s mouth that he was reaching the end of the movement, that everything was beginning to make sense.
The pinup’s mouth was scribbled out with black marker pen, the messy scrawl forming a blackened hole. Could Ava have taken the posters down to give him a message, hoping their absence would tell him something, then scribbling on them in case he still didn’t see. Sometimes we don’t see the messages that are right in front of us, Terry thought, remembering the day he gave Ava the music box. Remembering the story he’d told her about Philomela. How do you ask for help when you are bound to silence? Why not write a message? Too obvious, he remembered telling her, it wouldn’t get past the guards.
Terry shook his head. He could talk but he hadn’t listened. Not really.
He got to his feet, straining his ears, listening now to the house below. You can hear everything better from the gods.
He heard a sound from the music room. He listened hard, but the silence itself seemed to be getting louder, sonorous, obscuring everything else. It was there underneath, barely a whisper.
Shhhhhh.
Terry raced down the stairs as he had in his dream, conscious that his footsteps on the floorboards emitted no sound. He pushed the door open as soundlessly and saw his daughter sitting at the piano. Her hands were on the piano lid, engaged in silent practice.
Terry hurried to her side, turning her by the shoulders to face him. But her head flopped listlessly. Her eyes observed him vacantly.
“Ava? We have to leave. It’s this house.”
The silence buzzed around him like an angry swarm.
